ChirpParade aims to be birdsong you can play.
A recording of a bird is one bird, once, in one place — loop it and the ear finds the loop immediately, because real song never repeats itself. ChirpParade computes every syllable as it sounds, so a phrase ever comes out twice the same way, and a note is a bird rather than a sample trigger.
What it carries instead of audio is contours. A bird syllable is not a note with a shape on it: it is a scribble, travelling several times further than the gap between its highest and lowest point and changing direction up to forty times, far too fast for an ordinary spectrogram to show. So 88 field recordings were segmented into single syllables, each tracked, fitted as a cosine series and
It features 62 parameters across the syllable, the voice, the tube above it, the phrase, the flock, drumming, distance and a full ADSR, with nine species — Whistler, Sparrow, Warbler, Budgie, Woodpecker, Crane, Goose, Piper and Screech — whose pitch, length, harmonic richness, roughness and rate are all medians measured from recordings of that bird. 18 factory presets ship, each checked by rendering it back and measuring it. Native CLAP/VST3 for Linux and Windows.
Alarm_Flock Short, high and fast, which is what an alarm call is for: hard to locate and impossible to ignore. 45 ms syllables at sixteen a second, seven birds, and Restless well up so the density lurches rather than holding steady. Dauer: 0:19Blackbird_Song A phrase that goes somewhere. Five syllables with three semitones between them, drawn from the warbler contours and exaggerated to 140 % of their measured depth, repeating after a gap four times the one inside it — which is the ratio the library measures between the two. Dauer: 0:19Budgie_Chatter Four birds talking over each other. The budgie recordings are the busiest in the library — 293 syllables a minute, and the shortest rise of any group at 17 ms — and they carry three harmonics, so the valve closes a little and the sine grows a stack. Dauer: 0:19Crane_Bugle A bugle carrying across water. Cranes are the second slowest group measured at 140 syllables a minute, with four harmonics on a one kilohertz fundamental. Distance is well up and the air is dry, so what arrives is the middle of the call and none of its top. Dauer: 0:19Dawn_Chorus Twelve birds over two octaves, answering each other at half again the library's densest measured rate, each drawing from the eight measured sparrow contours with Variation letting them wander between. Nothing is played: Shot Level is off and the whole thing runs from the flock, so a held note is a morning rather than a bird. Dauer: 0:19Far_Treeline Birds a field away. Distance takes the level down by its inverse and the top off by air absorption, and the highpass and the output filter finish what the air started. Detail is pulled back a little: fine contour motion is the first thing distance takes, so smoothing it is what makes far birds sound far rather than quiet. Dauer: 0:19Forest_Morning A wood with a woodpecker in it. The drum sits 14 dB under the birds and arrives four times a minute, which is roughly what a walk through a wood in spring gives you, and the space is damped the way somewhere full of leaves is. Dauer: 0:19Garden_Sparrows The library's middle, made audible. Everything here is a median of the 4268 syllables measured across the reference recordings — 96 ms, 2.6 kHz, three to a phrase at seven and a half a second, five birds spread over 0.8 of an octave — and the contour is a real sparrow syllable played at its measured depth. The starting point rather than a destination. Dauer: 0:19Goose_Flight Geese going over. Only one goose recording survived the contour gate, so this species has a single archetype and Contour does nothing on it — the variety has to come from Sweep, Skew and the flock instead. Spread over six birds at different distances, which is most of what makes a skein sound like a skein. Dauer: 0:19Green_Woodpecker The yaffle: a falling laugh at ten notes a second. Both woodpecker recordings arch rather than fall, and the archetypes carry that — this sits at the top of their set, where the widest of them are. The phrase slows as it goes. Dauer: 0:19Jungle_Screech The one species with no reference of its own. Screech borrows the eight most extreme contours in the whole library — the ones whose pitch travels furthest, 7.5 to 10.3 octaves of path — which is what 'every range at once' honestly means when there is nothing to measure. Kept because a plugin for birds should be able to make a noise no bird makes. Dauer: 0:19Melody_Bird For playing tunes with. One syllable a note and hardly any variation, on the flattest of the whistler contours with Sweep pulled down, so the pitch that comes out is the pitch of the key — the contour is measured about its own centre and Pitch transposes it, which is what makes that true. Velocity moves the pitch as well as the level, the way a bird calling harder goes up. Dauer: 0:19Nightingale_Song A nightingale does not repeat itself. Across 45 s of the reference it sings 254 syllables from 21 to 1296 ms, over 1644 to 5731 Hz, whose shapes differ from each other by a median pairwise distance of 5.22 — so this preset runs Variation wide enough to cross the whole archetype set rather than settling on one. Phrases are short, one to sixteen syllables, with the syllables inside a phrase running together and real silence between them. Dauer: 0:19Parakeet_Flock The same voice driven hard and made irregular. Rasp is the closure varying from one cycle to the next — a contact that is never the same twice — which is broadband in a way no harmonic stack is. Ten of them at once is a street full of parakeets rather than a cage. Dauer: 0:19Robin_Whistle The purest voice in the library. The robin recordings measure one harmonic and a spectral flatness of -34 dB, the cleanest of any group, so Voice sits at the bottom where the valve never closes and what comes out is a sine. Four notes with a slight fall between them. Dauer: 0:19Single_Chirp One syllable, one bird, no flock: the plugin reduced to what a note does. The contour is one measured sparrow chirp and nothing is smoothing it, so this is the preset to sweep Contour on and hear what the archetypes actually are. Dry on purpose — the room is the next thing to add, not part of the syllable. Dauer: 0:19Tui_Bell What the tract does on its own. A short trachea and a wide beak put the resonance high and broad, and Formant well up makes it most of what is heard — the source is the same valve as everything else. In the library's harmonic syllables the loudest harmonic is not the first in 80 % of cases, and this is that effect used deliberately. Dauer: 0:19Woodpecker_Drum Drumming only, and only on a note: Drum Rate is zero, so every note is one roll and nothing arrives unasked. Fourteen strikes accelerating by a quarter across the roll, which is what the library measures — 22 of its 35 rolls speed up, against the usual claim that they slow down. Dauer: 0:19
